A virtual scare to distract from our horrible pandemic.
Things Heard & Seen
“Things that are in heaven are more real than things that are in the world.” (Emanuel Swedenborg)
When is a horror film not a horror film? When it is about
things that go wrong all day, like marriage and education, but are influenced by the past. Based on the novel All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage, Things Heard & Seen is a pleasant scare fest emphasizing the sins of its principal characters, present and past, and the robust life after death.
Swedenborg’s philosophy (see quote above) that sees a continuation of this life into the next pervades the story, giving it surprising heft. The 18th-century mystic’s influence on well-known Hudson Valley landscape painter George Inness, who showed the “reality of the unseen” connecting the “visible upon the invisible” extends the film’s creepy conjunction of past, present, and location. The Puritanical motif and Dutch locale accentuate punishment for sins. Ghosts? It’s set, after all, in Ichabod Crane country.
The strength in this lightly-cliched horror piece is the emphasis directors/writers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have given to a virtuous wife/painter, inexplicably bulimic Catherine (Amanda Seyfried), who has sacrificed her art success to move to the Valley with her husband, George (James Norton). He just secured a professorial job at a small college. As a friend comments, the town called “Chosen” (typical horror telegraphing) has “rich horsey weekenders and full-time rednecks.”
Almost immediately Catherine feels tremors in the house, hears voices, and puts up with bizarre electrical activity. Seems there is a history of wives being murdered well before the current 1980. (Luckily no cell phones means we will not be annoyed by calls that too easily propel plot.)
Berman and Pulcini dot the plot with hints about a current bad dude tied to the past as its instrument in the present. Not good for Catherine, whose husband George is preoccupied with his new job and pursuing pretty young co-eds. How he secured this job and keeps it is a commentary on charismatic teachers and harassment that continues to this day in the halls of academe.
The film features the shenanigans of the haunted-house’s past denizens rather than over-supplying horror fans with the usual motifs and tropes, not a bad thing at all. However, as a commentary on the insidiousness of corrupt marriages and their usual outcomes, Things Heard & Seen is enjoyable. That Catherine is not immune to the downside of infidelity, potentially her own, adds another layer to the complexity of the marriage theme.
In a sense it is a low-rent Who’s Afraid of Virginial Woolf, where alcohol was the devil, not some bloody ghosts from the 19th century. Yet those ghosts are at the least a contemporary manifestation of the marital disease very real today for the protagonists.
All in all, Things Heard & Seen highlights the emerging acclaim of Amanda Seyfried, lately of Oscar-nomination fame, and smart filmmakers’ willingness to merge philosophy and art with standard horror entertainment. As we usher out our own pandemic horror, it’s fun to be scared virtually.
(On Netflix)
Things Heard & Seen
Directors: Shari Springer Berman (Nannie Diaries), Robert Pulcini (Cinema Verite)
Screenplay: Berman, Pulcini, based on Elizabeth Brundage novel “All Things Cease to Appear”
Cast: Amanda Seyfried (Mank), James Norton (Little Women)
Run Time: 2h 1m
Rating: TV-MA
